2015 Canadian Hostile Take-Over Bid Study

The views expressed in this post, as in all of my posts, are mine alone and should not be taken to represent the views of Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP or any of my partners or associates.

A little over five years have passed since the U.K. Takeover Code was reformed on September 19, 2011 in order to prohibit deal protection provisions — including lock-ups, “no shop/no talk” covenants and termination or “break” fees — in M&A deals involving the acquisition of publicly-listed U.K. companies.  Seizing upon a rare and valuable opportunity to conduct some natural experiments into the effect on the U.K. M&A market of this regulatory change, a pair of students from Stanford and Harvard recently published a study on the impact of the 2011 Reforms on U.K. deal volumes, the incidence of competing offers, deal premiums and deal completion rates.[i]  The results of their study are both interesting and instructive.

Among other things, they found that:

  • the ratio of U.K. deals to non-U.K. deals[ii] decreased by approximately 50% after the 2011 Reforms;
  • this reduction in deal volume was not offset by any increase in the incidence of competing offers or deal premiums in the U.K.; and
  • as a result, the U.K. M&A market experienced an estimated quarterly loss of approximately US$19.3 billion in deal volume following the 2011 Reforms, implying a quarterly loss, assuming a conservative average deal premium of 20%, of approximately $3.3 billion to shareholders of U.K. public companies since the 2011 Reforms were put in place.

Continue Reading The Potential Costs of Public M&A Regulation: Lessons from Across the Pond

Nordex Explosives Ltd. (Nordex), a Canadian explosives manufacturer listed on the TSX Venture Exchange, and Société Anonyme d’Explosifs et de Produits Chimiques (EPC) entered into a private placement and subsequent going private transaction on June 15, 2016. EPC was to purchase Nordex shares for $0.12 per share.

However, subsequent to Nordex’s announcement of the EPC

On February 25, 2016, the CSA released the final version of the long-awaited changes to the Canadian take-over bid regime.  While the final rules are largely in line with the proposal that was released for comment almost a year ago, it is notable that the statutory minimum bid period has been shortened from

Fasken Martineau’s 2015 Canadian Hostile Take-Over Bid Study sets out the results of a ten-year empirical analysis of hostile take-over bids in Canada.

Key findings include: When initiating a public contest for control, a hostile bidder was successful more than half the time; however, a change of control was by no means inevitable, with targets